/m/chatter

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Well, Sabes now has three WS teams in 16 years. He's shown that he's flexible and quick on his feet. He's also shown a propensity to avoid superstar players in favor of the latest mediocrity, and he has a serious talent at picking older guys who are undervalued. When he's wrong on a guy, they typically collapse, though.

He's been a poor drafter until he drafted excellently the last 7 years or so. He almost always has a good bullpen. He hires good managers and seems to work well with them. The most frustrating part about Brian Sabean is that some of his moves are really obviously bad ideas, and they turn out terribly. He also leaks truly awful proposed deals to the media (Lincecum for Rios).

He seems to get lucky a lot by having moves that he was ready to make not happen (Gary Matthews Jr., Carlos Lee). He's terrible, just terrible at signing guys not named Bonds to big money deals, but great at finding year to year guys.

Will it stop him from making dumb moves? Because he went out an made a couple headscratchers right after winning the last one.

Name one GM that doesn't make dumb moves.

You can laugh at "a couple headscratchers," or you can focus on stuff like trading for Scutaro, trading for Pagan, signing Vogelsong, picking up Mijares and Lopez for nothing, drafting Posey, Sandoval, Belt, Lincecum, Cain, Bumgarner, Romo (in the 28th round), etc.

The Vogelsong signing can't be anything other than luck. Anyone would have traded for Scutaro, and he played better than could have been predicted. The drafting has been excellent, but teams have scouts for that. Granted, the GM hires the scouts. Sabean is, as far as can be told from the information we have, very good at player development, and not very good at major league decision making. If I were picking a GM for my team, I'd rather have that package than the opposite one, because developing as many quality players as possible seems to be the single biggest driver of team success..

The Vogelsong signing can't be anything other than luck. Anyone would have traded for Scutaro, and he played better than could have been predicted.

I understand what you are saying- any team could have signed Vogelsong or traded for Scutaro, but Sabean was the only one who did...just like anyone could have signed Huff, Ross, and Burrell in 2010 but no one else did. He's made many, many mistakes. I just find it odd that when he does something right it's "luck" or an "obvious move" no one else happened to make, and when he drafts a good young player it's the scouts that deserve the credit. But when he makes a bad move it's all his fault. I'm sure you could say the same thing for most GM's- people focus on the mistakes more than anything else, no matter how much success they have.